[The medical reconstruction of human nature in the 11(th) and 12 (th) centuries].

At the end of the 11(th) century, translations of Greek and above all Arabic texts played an important role in the building of a new medical science in western christendom. Although the men reading these texts were not all physicians, they could find in them a representation of human nature showing both its specificities and its similarities with the inanimate world. This representation, which was circulating before philosophical texts were first translated, emphasized the links between the state of the body and the passions of the soul, without assuming a psychological determinism that would have been unacceptable in the Christian context.